Psalm 29

Psalm 29 is a hymn to God's power and might, especially as manifested in natural phenomena. It's possible that the biblical author was caught in a thunderstorm and thought to express his awe through this text. William L. Holladay believes that it is one of the oldest of the Psalms, although one might quibble with his reason for so assuming. Psalm 29 appears near the climax of Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Heir of Redcliffe, which had a huge influence on Abraham Kuyper's walk with God. It is the last Psalm sung at evening prayer on the 5th day of the month in the Book of Common Prayer.

Psalm 116 and a young organist

Who could fail to be inspired by the competence at the organ of a very young Cameron Oostdyk playing Genevan Psalm 116? This video was posted seven years ago. Oostdyk is now grown and studying at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, USA. May God bless his studies, and may he continue to accompany God's people as they sing their praises.

Psalm 23 and Herzliebster Jesu: A derivative relationship

The Genevan Psalter provided the basis for several tunes that would come to be matched to unrelated hymn texts. A few of these would be borrowed verbatim, such as the tune for Psalm 42 and the beloved Advent hymn, Comfort, Comfort, Ye My People, a free versification of the initial verses of Isaiah 40. Other tunes would be altered to fit a new text, such as the tune for Psalm 23 and HERZLIEBSTER JESU, usually translated as Ah, Holy Jesus, How Hast Thou Offended. Here are the two tunes below:

 

Three paschal hymns

My affection for the tradition of German chorales is related to my love for the tunes of the Genevan Psalter, as I've written before in this space. Here are three chorales for Easter:

Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed!

A Holy Week hymn: O Sacred Head

During Holy Week, especially Good Friday, western Christians throughout the world sing this beloved hymn, O Sacred Head, Now Wounded. Written in German by Paul Gerhardt (1607-1676), it is based on a hymn by St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153). The tune was composed by Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612). The tradition of German chorales, bequeathed to us by the Lutheran churches, bears considerable similarity to that of the Genevan Psalms. Repeated initial phrases, irregular metres, and a plethora of feminine endings are the signs of a shared continental heritage.

Psalm 11

I have now added a performance of Genevan Psalm 11 to my YouTube channel and playlist. The full Genevan Psalter playlist now consists of 78 such performances with more forthcoming.

Lift Up Your Hearts: a hymnal review

From 1934 until quite recently, the Christian Reformed Church in North America worshipped with a succession of Psalter Hymnals, the most recent of which was published in 1989 and sported a grey cover. This volume sat in the pews of congregations until the grand shift to overhead slides with words, and in some cases music, projected onto screens, enabling parishioners to sing without books in their hands, as well as to sing songs not contained in the books.

Our own congregation replaced the grey Psalter Hymnals some years ago with a collection jointly produced by the CRC and the Reformed Church in America (RCA), called, Lift Up Your Hearts: Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs (LUYH). We read this on the hymnal's website:

Psalm 10

My Genevan Psalter recording project continues apace with the addition of Psalm 10. The entire playlist can be found here: The Genevan Psalter.

Psalms 28/109

Given their subject matter, Psalms 28 and 109 are probably among the less sung psalms in the church's liturgy. But the metrical psalters of the 16th and 17th centuries included all 150 Psalms. Here is my guitar performance of the shared Genevan tune, which can be found in my Genevan Psalter playlist on my YouTube channel.

Revised New Jerusalem Bible, review

As a young man raised in a Christian home, I became enamoured of The Jerusalem Bible, a translation based on La Bible de Jérusalem, published in France in 1956. I had tried such paraphrases as J. B. Phillips' New Testament in Modern English and Kenneth Taylor's The Living Bible. In fact, I had received a copy of the latter at Christmas 1970 and read it from cover to cover over the next six months or so. I was so put off by its obvious anachronisms and excessive literary breeziness that I quickly abandoned it for something better. The Jerusalem Bible (JB), published in 1966, seemed an obvious alternative. It reads very well and has a certain literary quality that appealed to me. I found it intriguing as well because it included those extra books in the Old Testament that Protestants group together as part of the Apocrypha.

YouTube channel organized

Over the past two months I have uploaded quite a large number of videos to my @ByzantineCalvinist YouTube channel, mostly guitar performances of the Genevan Psalm tunes and a very few hymns and canticles. But I have also posted videos relevant to my new book, Citizenship Without Illusions. Last week I reorganized the material in my channel, grouping them into playlists devoted to 

• Political Visions and Illusions
• Interviews and conversations
• Commentaries and lectures
• Citizenship Without Illusions
• Hymns for guitar
• The Niagara Psalter, and
  
• The Genevan Psalter

Some of these playlists include videos from other channels relevant to my work, including reviews of my books and personal interviews. I will be adding more to these lists over time. In the meantime, take a moment to click on some of the links immediately above and see what's on offer.

Liturgy page amended

As visitors to this blog will note, the right sidebar contains several pages devoted to matters related to the Genevan and other psalters. One of these is a page titled LORD'S DAY LITURGY  for Reformed Churches. I have now updated this page by adding several performances of tunes from my YouTube channel, especially the Genevan Psalter playlist. I have also provided two alternative settings of the Decalogue, to be used depending on whether the law is read according to its first or third use. The setting and metrical versification for the Creed are my own.

The Genevan Psalter: YouTube channel

My work at uploading guitar performances of the Genevan Psalm tunes continues apace. The entire playlist can be accessed here: The Genevan Psalter. As of the beginning of 2025 the playlist consists of 63 such performances. Here are two recent uploads:

Psalm 122:

Psalm 149:

Incidentally, I have received a second grant from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship in support of further editing of my Genevan Psalter collection. I have chosen as a general title, "The Genevan Psalter for Everyone," and will shortly be seeking a publisher. If anyone knows of a possible publisher for my collection, I would be grateful for any suggestions. Thanks in advance.

'My soul declares aloud': A metrical version of Mary's Magnificat

My latest column at Christian Courier is titled: 'My soul declares aloud': A metrical version of Mary's Magnificat. I offer it here to readers of a local Christian periodical for which I've written for nearly 35 years. Although the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) is obviously not one of the Psalms, it is traditionally classified as a biblical canticle and has been sung in the church's liturgy since the very beginning. We should certainly be singing it today as well.

Text © David T. Koyzis, 1987.

RAPT interview

In recent years I've been interviewed on subjects related to my books and other writings, but my new RAPT interview required that I bare my soul in a more personal way. One of the questions posed had me revisiting my work with the Psalms. Here's an excerpt:

Although I changed to political science during my second year, music is more than a sideline for me. My latest obsession is the “Genevan Psalter,” a metrical Psalter completed in 1562, in which several people set the biblical Psalms to verse and composed melodies for them, some of which were based on familiar Gregorian chant tunes. It took me from 1985 to 2021, but I set all 150 Psalms to verse in English meter so they could be sung to these tunes. I hope to publish this collection eventually, and I’ve received funding from two sources for this project. During the past week or so, I have recorded guitar performances of several of these tunes and posted them on my YouTube channel.

Many contemporary Protestants don’t know that their forebears sang the Psalms, but they did — right into the 19th century. Some traditions still do so, but they are a minority, sad to say. My ultimate goal is to revive the ancient practice of singing the Psalms, which should be an integral part of all Christian liturgies.

Do read the entire interview for more.

Ali Ufki's Turkish Psalms

Many years ago I became interested in Ali Ufki, a Polish-born Reformed Christian who in his youth was abducted by Tatars, sold to the Ottoman Sultan, nominally converted to Islam, and became treasurer, translator, and musician to the Sultan's court. Among his brilliant accomplishments, he translated the Bible into Turkish (which is how my late father knew him) and also the first 14 of the Genevan Psalms. 

I have just discovered the Kitab-ı Mukaddes Şirketi (Bible Society of Turkey) YouTube channel, which contains performances of all 14 of Ali Ufki's Psalms: Ali Ufkî Bey’in Bestelediği Mezmurlar. Hearing this seemingly exotic music, one would scarcely believe that it had originated with the Reformation in western Europe. Here is one such performance below:

Intriguing, no? Do listen to the entire playlist. And just imagine if Ali Ufki (born Wojciech Bobowski) had had the opportunity to translate all 150 of the Psalms! Might the history of the eastern Mediterranean have been utterly different? Could the gospel have spread throughout the Ottoman Empire?

Genevan Psalter: guitar arrangements

Over the past few days I have been posting on my YouTube channel videos of my guitar arrangements and performances of the Genevan Psalms. I have created a playlist which allows the viewer to play all of them in order. This can be accessed here: The Genevan Psalter. Here are two of my performances below:

 

I will be posting more such videos in the future. Stay tuned.

The English Bible

Today the church observes the 507th anniversary of the day Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. Although many people believe that the Reformation began with Luther, most of the typical doctrines that we associate with that movement had precedents in mediaeval England and subsequently spread to the European continent. In other words, the doctrines of grace, as recovered by Luther and Calvin and so many others in the 16th century, were already understood and believed by Christians centuries earlier, especially among the Lollards, the Hussites, and the Waldensians.

But of course all of this depended on ordinary Christians being able to read the Bible for themselves in their own languages and thereby to discern its true teachings. Today the English language in particular boasts a huge number of bible translations for every conceivable use and occasion. We speakers of the language are singularly blessed by such an abundance of spiritual riches. But there was once a time when most Christians did not have access to the Bible and had to depend on hearing only sections of it read in the liturgy in a language with which they might not be familiar. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century changed all this, laying the foundations for the Reformation.

De Nieuwe Psalmberijming: Psalm 151

No, there isn't exactly a Psalm 151, or at least it's not titled such. But an additional one does occur in the Greek Septuagint (LXX) translation of the Old Testament as a Psalm "outside the number," or a supernumerary Psalm, about which I wrote two years ago. It is known especially in the Orthodox tradition, where it is accorded something close to canonical status. If Protestants are at all aware of it, they consider it part of the Apocrypha, those extra books (Judith, Tobit, the Maccabees, &c.) often included in an appendix after the New Testament or between the two testaments.

So I was surprised—pleasantly so, to be sure—to discover that our friends behind De Nieuwe Psalmberijming have recently posted a Dutch metrical versification of this psalm set to the Genevan tune for Psalm 19: Psalm 151. To be clear, the arrangement is not precisely of the version found in the LXX but of a longer version found at Qumran and thus part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This psalm is unusual in being autobiographical in nature and is written in the voice of David himself. The story recounted is the familiar one in which David slays the Philistine warrior Goliath of Gath (1 Samuel 17).

'O', 'oh': interjections and our English Bible translations

In my work with the Psalms I've noticed a peculiarity in several contemporary English translations. In the King James Version of the Bible, we read the following:

O come, let us sing unto the Lord:
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation (Psalm 95:1).

But in the English Standard Version we read this:

Oh come, let us sing to the Lord;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!

And in the New King James Version this:

Oh come, let us sing to the Lord!
Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation.